URGENT! Debate paper

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

1

Multiculturalism or “Sinicization?: Dueling Perspectives on Qing Success

Evelyn Rawski and Ho Ping-ti published dueling papers in the 1990s, each arguing for a

different interpretation of the Qing Empire’s historical success. Citing newly translated Manchu

documents, Rawski attacked Han-centric research and argued that the Qing’s multiethnic identity

was its key to success. Elaborating upon an earlier piece, Ho responded that the Qing Empire

was dependent upon the vast resources of Han China, and that scholarship should remain focused

on tracing “Sinicization”. Each piece bears flaws, with Rawski’s argument weakened by her

failure to properly emphasize the Han role in the Qing Empire and Ho’s weakened by its overly

broad definition of “Sinicization” and the author’s own ethnocentrism. Ultimately, however,

neither position is necessarily inimical to the other; the Qing Empire owes its success both to its

multicultural outreach and its effective cooptation of the vast Han Chinese population, as well as

novel fiscal reforms not attributable to one or another culture.

Rawski’s primary argument is that the longevity and unprecedented size of the Qing

Empire was due to its ability to coopt disparate cultures into a shared imperial project. This

ability originated “…outside the Great Wall and not from within the political arena dominated by

Han Chinese literati…” as evidenced by the fact that “…Manchu conquest of the Ming lands was

achieved with a multiethnic force…”.1 Once the Ming were defeated, the Qing continued this

strategy of cooptation, recognizing “…five peoples: the Manchus [comprising the Late Jin

coalition of Jurchen and adjoining peoples], Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and Chinese,” and

1 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 834.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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“…disseminated different images of rulership…” to each.2,3 Notable examples are “…thangkas

depicting the Qianlong emperor as [the Tibetan bodhisattva] Manjusri…” and the adoption by all

Qing emperors of the Mongol title bogdo kaghan (Great Khan).4 Additionally, the Qing decision

to “…differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the

former Ming provinces,” granted subject peoples (or at least their ruling elites) a considerable

level of political and cultural autonomy5. In all cases, however, the Qing rulers also “...eroded

autonomous sources of power and prestige to establish themselves as the source of all secular

authority.”6 Mongol nobles and Tarim Basin begs, for example, only inherited their titles with

imperial consent, while in Tibet the Emperor held absolute authority to “…recognize rebirths and

approve appointments of high prelates.”7 Such cooptation of the elite eliminated the

unsustainable expense, administrative bloat, local alienation the Qing would have incurred had

they opted instead for direct rule over all Imperial territories.

The flaws in Rawski’s argument may be attributed to overzealousness and lack of clarity.

When she makes such assertions as “…[the] incorporation of Inner Asian and Chinese

ideological themes into a new kind of rulership was…precisely the key to their extraordinary

achievements…” she seems to suggest that Qing rulership constituted a wholly new Inner-

Asian/Chinese ruling culture. As previously explained, she identifies the Qing’s strength as the

capacity to build cultural coalitions, rather than their maintenance of any one coalition per se.

Her emphasis on Inner Asian cultures, however, distracts from that fundamental skill and to a

2 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 835. 3 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 834. 4 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 835. 5 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 831. 6 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 835-836. 7 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 836.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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degree minimizes the value of control over “China Proper” to the Empire. Ho rightly points out

that governing the Qing Empire meant “…first and foremost developing the capacities to rule

China’s many hundreds of millions of people,” who represented much of the Empire’s

manpower and resources.8 A further flaw in Rawski’s analysis that opens her up to attack from

Ho is her definition of Sinicization as “…the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who entered

the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture…”.9 Ho does indeed

play into the tropes of “Han chauvinism” when he says Chinese culture is defined by “…open-

mindedness and large heartedness…” which, he argues, “…could not fail to create a favorable

impression upon the thinking aliens.”10 Ho’s concept of “Sinicization” is laced with ethnocentric

bias that reduces his capacity to detect nuance, but his definition of the concept nonetheless

extends far beyond assimilation into Chinese culture, and as a result he perceives her analysis to

be hopelessly myopic.

Ho’s primary argument is that the Qing “…policy of systemic Sinicization enabled

Manchu rulers to win the loyal support of the overwhelming majority of their subjects [or more

accurately the Han elites who commanded them]…”, which gave them the sheer manpower,

resources, and social infrastructure to maintain their vast domain.11 With Chinese elites coopted

into the Qing system, the Qing were able to leverage brute force solutions to problems they could

not solve through subtle diplomacy. This is most evident in military matters, where vast Han

armies with competent Han generals neutralized powerful threats such as the Taiping Heavenly

Kingdom and Muslim revolts in the Northwest territories, in effect “…salvaging…” an empire

8 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 125. 9 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 842. 10 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 151. 11 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 147.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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that could no longer stand up on the force of the old Banner armies alone.12 To a lesser degree of

success (discussed later), Han Chinese settlers were also sometimes deployed in an attempt to

water down restive regions with loyal subjects.

Ho also seems to argue that “Sinic” culture does indeed spontaneously assimilate non-

Chinese people, a phenomenon that he feels widened the Qing’s grasp on power on account of

their affinity with the Han populace. In formulating this idea he draws upon the work of the

“…great European sinologists and philologists…” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period

in which theories of social Darwinism and races as monoliths were made popular by global

imperialism.13 Central to this line of thought is his assertion that any non-Chinese cultural

influences are “…tested, sifted, digested, and absorbed…” into Chinese culture without changing

its underlying identity.14 In contrast, he assumes cultures influenced by China to be “Sinicized”,

and thus subsumed within the larger Chinese cultural complex. This view of Chinese cultural

expansion as “…continual and unending…”, buttressed by the obviously enormous population

and wealth of “China Proper”, naturally leads him to the conclusion that “Sinicizing” is essential

to the maintenance of any large-scale East Asian empire.15

Ho’s primary weakness is that his definition of “Sinicization” is broad to the point of

being nebulous, encompassing culture, bureaucratic governance, the practice of Confucianism,

service in imperial armies, the use of Han Chinese troops, settler colonialism, fiscal reforms, and

unenforced de jure changes in regional governance. Many of these simply cannot be counted as

12 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 148. 13 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 150. 14 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 152. 15 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 152.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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“Sinicization” in the literal sense of “becoming Chinese”. As previously discussed, the Qing

“Sinicized” by adopting Chinese culture and governance, the Qing army “Sinicized” “…in the

sense of its being completely dominated by the Chinese…”, and areas colonized by Han settlers

were Sinicized in the sense that non-Han residents were displaced or sometimes completely

outnumbered.16 Mere association with anything “Chinese”, however, does not mean something

has “become Chinese”. The deployment to a region of armies filled with Han recruits does not

mean that region has been Sinicized; it means that the Qing have successfully exploited their

control of the Han populace. Similarly, settler colonialism on its own is only demographic

Sinicization; the act in and of itself is, again, more indicative of the political use of the Han

populace. Most tenuous are what Ho terms “administrative Sinicization” and “systemic

Sinicization”. In the former case, regions devoid of effective government control are reclassified

as provinces for “…psychological and international jurisdictional effect.”17 In the latter case Ho

refers mainly to “…a series of equitable fiscal reforms…” which facilitated farming and led to a

meteoric rise in the (exploitable) Han Chinese population.18 Given this broad range, Ho’s

working definition of “Sinicization” is best understood as referring to the leveraging of Chinese

people and social infrastructure to achieve imperial goals. Even with this clarified definition,

however, one does not find an invariable causational mechanism between “Sinicization” and

Qing success. In Zungharia, for instance, Ho confesses that colonization was ultimately

“…inadequate to stabilize this vast area of unusual ethnic and religious complexity.”19 Similarly,

“administrative Sinicization” merely constituted “…a calculated gesture that could not be backed

up by political and military strength,” and only truly paid off when it justified the irredentist

16 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 147. 17 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 149. 18 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 149. 19 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 146.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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conquests of the People’s Republic of China.20 Exploitation of the vast Chinese population was

absolutely crucial to Qing success, but it was only part of a larger strategy of cultural cooptation

without which the Qing could never have arisen from Manchuria in the first place.

Both scholars leaned heavily on secondary analyses of primary sources, but each was

particularly influenced by a specific set of documents. In Rawski’s case a focus on recently

translated Manchu and Banner documents directed her attention to the cultural heterogeneity and

flexibility of the Qing at the cost of underemphasizing the importance of Chinese cooptation.21

Ho, for his part, was influenced by the theories of 19th century born European scholars and his

own nationalist-era professors, which conferred on him a conception of Chinese culture as

adaptive, yet monolithic, eternal, and ever-expanding.22 Examining the author’s arguments at

their most fundamental, however, one finds a dearth of conflict between the two. The

simultaneous cooptation of Han Chinese by the Qing and cooptation of the Qing elite by the Han

cultural complex is undoubtedly the heart of Qing identity and the backbone of the Empire.

However, the Qing’s ability to coopt other cultures into a shared, if culturally differentiated,

project of rule was instrumental to conquering and stabilizing the Empire. Neither is mutually

exclusive, and both were key to an empire that spanned the overwhelmingly Han provinces of

“China Proper” and non-Han territories abroad.

Bibliography

Cheng, Pei-Kai, Michael Lestz and Jonathan Spence. The Search for Modern China: A

Documentary Collection. WW Norton & Company, 1990.

20 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 149. 21 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 829-830. 22 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 150.

Jean-Michel Ricard

CHIN 185A, Prof. Zheng

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De Bary, William Theodore, and Richard John Lufrano. Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 2.

Columbia University Press, 1999.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, ed. Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. Simon and Schuster, 2009.

Ho, Ping-ti. "In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's “Reenvisioning the

Qing”." The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 123-155.

Ho, Ping-ti. "The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History." The Journal of Asian

Studies 26, no. 2 (1967): 189-195.

Rawski, Evelyn S. "Presidential address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The significance of the Qing

period in Chinese history." Journal of Asian Studies (1996): 829-850.